I seem to be having this monthly blog check in pattern going. Ahh well, such is life. These days sitting down at the computer means doing lesson planning, with ye olde faithful blog taking a back seat.
The infamous Japan summer has returned in all it's sweaty splendour. Right now the June rainy season is meeting the July heat to create air so thick and hot that you can practically grab it and wring it out. Clothes on the clothesline stay ever so slightly damp and it has become a daily game of "chase the mold" in the ofuro (bath and shower room).
Yet as much as I'd like to park myself in front of an air conditioner or fan for the next month and a half, I cannot do that. There seems to be a vast conspiracy of factors whose primary goal is to keep me guessing. Case in point....
The Pee Dictionary.
Yes, that's right, I wrote "pee dictionary".
We have these three cats, you see.
The white one, Raku, is afraid of her own shadow and is a perpetual source of flying white hairballs.
The black one, Doko, spends her days begging us to turn on the faucet in the bathroom sink so she can sip water, drop by drop, for long minutes while we wait to turn the thing off.
And we have the orange one, Genki. Genki is not a hairball hurling coward nor does she have a water fixation. At least, not a drinking water fixation.
Genki is what I would call a pee performance artist. While most of the time she is happy to use the litter box, sometimes she just needs a new kind of canvas. Once in a great while we'll find all the bathroom towels slid to the floor off the towel rack, each one with a neat circle of pee upon it. Or we'll find a stray piece of printer paper that was dropped on the floor, again with that neat yellow circle of pee upon it.
Genki doesn't do these things on a regular basis. We can go months without a pee circle revealing itself upon something. Nor does she seem to do these things out of some sort of need for vengeance.
So when I found one of the kid's Japanese bags (which contained their notebook, homework papers, pencils and such) on the floor, I had a sneaky suspicion what I would find.
Yes, a fragrant wet mess which included, among the aforementioned items, an English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary we've had since our first trip to Japan.
Embellished, as it were, with pee.
Drat.
As I reported on my Facebook page, during one of my Friday Starbucks sojurns (wherein I go to Starbucks and write bad poetry while the kids have Japanese lessons), I was approached by an older Japanese man.
He handed me a hand-bound book, written in Japanese and painstakingly translated English, about haiku.
The book explained the history of haiku, talked about the difficulty of translating this art form into another language, and then gave samples of haiku, again written in both Japanese and English. Clearly this was a labor of haiku love for him, one which he distributed, one by one, to the foreign coffee drinkers of Kyoto.
During last week's Starbucks trip, he approached me again and gave me another book (so very many foreigners, it must be hard to keep us all sorted out). I accepted it, as he seemed intent on sharing it. When Aya and I got done and left Starbucks, he left right after us.
He saw Aya standing on the bridge near Starbucks, taking pictures of the river below. He tapped me on the shoulder and offered to take our picture. Aya, ever cautious, was hesitant to let a stranger take the camera. So she snapped a picture of HaikuMan and I. He seemed rather pleased, and Aya didn't have to endanger her camera. A win-win I suppose.
And, of course, I can show the world that I'm not making this stuff up.
Sigh.
Well, I have more to say, but not enough time to say it. Sleep is calling. As it always does this time of night.
Yawn.
Until next ime....
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